Our house is on fire. Join the resistance: Do no harm/take no shit. My idiosyncratic and confluent bricolage of progressive politics, the collaborative commons, next generation cognitive neuroscience, American pragmatism, de/reconstruction, dynamic systems, embodied realism, postmetaphysics, psychodynamics, aesthetics. It ain't much but it's not nothing.

Sunday, June 30, 2019

You've likely seen this picture of a drowned father and daughter who were seeking asylum by crossing the Rio Grande. The cartoon below is an accurate depiction of how our Presidunce likely responded to it.

Dump and his Repugs always tout the low unemployment rate, but according to our own Bureau of Labor Statistics here is the definition of employment: "People are considered employed if they did any work at all for pay or profit during the survey reference week. This includes all part-time and temporary work, as well as
regular full-time, year-round employment." They also include in that cateogory "unpaid family workers." Hence a low unemployment rate doesn't at all negate the atrocious poverty conditions of an increasing number of people considered employed. And of course even full-time, employed people making minimum wage, or below an adequate fair wage of $15 an hour and living in poverty conditions, makes meaningless any low statistic on employment status.

"Recall that the Greek chthonios means 'of, in, or under the Earth and the seas.' […] The chthonic ones are precisely not sky gods, not a foundation for the Olympiad, not friends to the Anthropocene or Capitalocene, and definitely not finished. […] Chthonic underworld powers who avenge crimes against the natural order."

"The Gorgons turned men who looked into their living, venomous, snake-encrusted faces into stone. I wonder what might have happened if those men had known how to politely greet the dreadful chthonic ones. I wonder if such manners can still be learned, if there is time to learn now, or if the stratigraphy of the rocks will only register the ends and end of a stony Anthropos."I also like this about Haraway, indicative of the collaborative commons. She

Saturday, June 29, 2019

"Why should you read this latest report of the P2P Foundation, and why does it matter?

Our inspiration comes from the great synthesis provided by Kate Raworth in her book, Doughnut Economics, which graphically presents the great question of our age: can we produce for human needs, without exceeding planetary boundaries?

In our opinion, this requires a fundamental change towards a commons-centric economic system, which can successfully not just conserve, but regenerate human and natural resources. How? By using the ‘technosphere’: our accumulation of technical and scientific knowledge, but on a new basis of a deep ecological consciousness, in partnership with the other beings on the planet.

To do this, we must take fully into account our impact on the world. First of all, we must recognize and mitigate our negative impacts, but we must also recognize positive contributions that remain unrecognized. Thus we enter into the sphere of what economists call ‘externalities’, and which are present barely recognized in our value and accounting systems.

The good news is that, at the same time that a growing number of people are recognizing the systemic crisis and its relation to ecology, tools are coming online that allow us to manage our economic processes differently.

Maher's new rule on the sci-fi nerd fantasy of colonizing Mars. He rightly thinks the money for that expedition would be better spent investing in our home world. And by the way, if we took care of our home world we wouldn't need to move to Mars. It's the very notion that we can just destroy our environment and then move somewhere else that in fact contributes to that very destruction. Maher isn't anti-science, since we need that science to address the climate crisis. He is though anti the sort of science that thinks we can just destroy our planet because we have the capacity to move on.

John Bolton Urges War Against The Sun After Uncovering Evidence It Has Nuclear CapabilitiesWASHINGTON—Amid escalating tensions with the hostile celestial object, National Security Adviser John Bolton argued for military action against the Sun Monday after being presented with evidence it has nuclear capabilities. “Newly collected intelligence shows the Sun, day after day, generating extreme levels of nuclear energy, and America simply cannot stand idly by any longer,” said Bolton, adding that the United States will soon be forced to consider a preemptive attack on the Sun, such as deploying troops to the Sun’s surface or a targeted strike to swiftly take out the Sun. “We know the Sun is harboring dangerous amounts of nuclear power in what we are referring to as its ‘Core,’ a site where the Sun appears to be fusing over 600 million metric tons of hydrogen every second. This is, needless to say, an extremely powerful, aggressive star that threatens the American way of life, and, frankly, I question the utility of negotiating with such an unreasonable orb.” Bolton added that the United States would likely consider military action after giving the Sun a chance to comply with a nuclear accord.

Good job in this video showing that Biden directly opposed integrated busing. He called it "asinine," "bankrupt," "racist" and said it "doesn't work." Hopefully exposing Biden will lower his poll numbers to the point of him leaving the race.

Thought of this one today, how out of necessity we have to work so damned much to support a family which takes most of our time away from it. We really need to change the way we organize our life with a different paradigm, as the one we have ain't working.

Continuing the last post, then there's Haraway's essay on the Cthulucene, how we have to transform our way of thinking to tentacular. Some excerpts:

"What happens when human exceptionalism and bounded individualism, those old saws of Western philosophy and political economics, become unthinkable in the best sciences, whether natural or social? Seriously unthinkable: not available to think with."

"Tentacularity is about life lived along lines — and such a wealth of lines — not at points, not in spheres. […] Focusing on intrusion rather than composition, Stengers calls Gaia a fearful and devastating power that intrudes on our categories of thought, that intrudes on thinking itself. [… Gaia is] complex nonlinear couplings between processes that compose and sustain entwined but nonadditive subsystems as a partially cohering systemic whole."

Good TED talk on the bodily-distributed brain of cephalopods. Seems we need to learn about forms of intelligence from a different line of evolution that might improve our own. Hence the myth of Cthulhu coming up from the deep to transform our land-locked world.

I loved it when Harris went after Biden last night on the segregationist collusion. Even though Bernie is my favorite Harris won the night for me. Also see her later explanation of the Biden attack. Biden used a bogus States rights defense and Harris is right that when States abuse their citizens the Fed must step in.

I was also disappointed on the paucity of discussion on climate crisis. Harris again scored points by noting it's not just climate change but climate crisis. It needs to be repeatedly framed that way.

Thursday, June 27, 2019

The House passed a version that had humanitarian provisions and accountability for abusive concentration camps. McConnel scrapped it entirely and pushed his own version through the Senate minus all of that. Now Pelosi is going to just pass the Senate version with no Dem negotiation or amendments to put back in what McConnell took out. WTF is wrong with Pelosi? AOC is rightly and highly pissed, as we all should be.

Continuing this post, Warren was only 1 of 2 at the debate that raised their hand when asked if they'd replace private health insurance with Medicare For All. She then went on to rigorously defend it in this clip.

He comments on the plethora of twisted ideas in the transition from postmodernism to metamodernism:

"This is the abyss of neo-reactionaries: anti-pomos, Jungians (yes, Jungians, read up on Jung and the Nazis, folks), (anti-feminist) masculinists, neo-nationalists, Petersonians, meta-right, the integral alt-right, the authoritarian right integralists (almost entirely made up of the waste of the largely failed integral movement, almost only older men, spending very much time on social media), neo-conservatives, meta-nazis, anti-environmentalists, anti-sociologists (who want to turn the world into a forced therapy session of icky workshops, because it's 'all about the individual')… These are all *pathological* positions, all failing the developmental transition from pomo to metamodern. They are people who do understand the faults and pathologies of pomo, but who fail to integrate the pomo insights, ethics and critiques."

See this article. It's an extension of the capitalistic myth of the individual hero who defeats all challengers by the sheer grit of his determination and will."The concept of 'alpha male' wolves that assert dominance over their pack through aggression comes from a debunked model of lupine social groups. David Mech introduced the idea of the alpha to describe behavior observed in captive animals. […] But, as he outlined in a 1999 paper, he's since rejected that idea in light of research into the behavior of wolves in the wild. […] All of which is to say: Humans who enjoy the idea of 'alpha males' might want to keep in mind that there isn't really any such thing. And to the extent the term has any meaning at all, it describes the behavior of captive, lonely creatures."

Good new post by Bonnitta Roy. She uses process philosophy to challenge the limiting paradigm of complexity science, partly because it tries to explain everything in its own terms. Her suggestion is"a shift from thinking in terms of adaptive pressure and escalating complexity, toward a more process philosophical view where systems are not bounded entities with agency that struggle to adapt, but are construed as relational states composed by all agents that strive to advance." The latter are potential states that have different possibilities that can cohere into actual occasions under the right conditions. Yet these potentials subsist the existence of actual occasions and continue to affect the latter. This is highly reminiscent of the discussion of convergent and divergent thought above, and indicative of what I'm calling hier(an)archical synplexity.This last quote highlights what I see as how the collaborative commons works through this process, in distinction from the enlightened heroes figuring it all out from their complex ivory towers which supposedly and hopefully 'trickles down' to the rest of us."In a world as diverse in people and rich in meanings as ours, big change might come from small acts by everyone operating everywhere in the contexts that already present themselves in their ordinary lives."

As performed on Colbert last night. It's a perfect message for these times: We need to face and get over our fear, to drive our own way into activism so as to change our government to represent we the people. Take the wheel people!

As interviewed by Colbert. AOC thinks Warren and Castro did the best. She diplomatically avoided commenting on who did the worst. She also emphasized that the climate crisis was virtually ignored and that there must be a debate solely dedicated to it. Needless to say, establishment Dems and the corporate media will see to it that it never happens. We'll have to wait until the two final candidates face off in real debate. Also see Colbert's monologue on the debate.

They decided along partisan lines that federal courts cannot rule on State gerrymandering, that it's strictly a matter of voters and their chosen legislators. But that's the point: Gerrymandering doesn't let the voter's truly decide their legislators in that rigged system. If effect, the Corp thinks it's fine to rig elections in their own favor, meaning they ruled against democracy.

He's right that the district that contains San Francisco needs a real progressive, not the establishment apologist Pelosi. Good interview where Shahid Buttar lays out why he wants to replace her and his progressive policy proposals.

Continuing this post, Emma also asked supporters what they thought about Warren, after initially supporting MFA, sort of backtracking on the issue. One respondent had the usual, establishment position that while Warren supported it she was also 'pragmatic' so had less ambitious back-up plans. See some of the other responses in the video below. Also note that Warren did not mention MFA at all in her rally speech.

Philosophy and the Mind Sciences (PhiMiSci) focuses on the interface between philosophy of mind, psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. PhiMiSci is a peer-reviewed, not-for-profit open-access journal that is free for authors and readers.

Editorial policy

The inaugural issue of PhiMiSci will be a Special Topic on Radical Disruptions of Self-Consciousness, edited by Thomas Metzinger (Mainz) and Raphaël Millière (Oxford). Manuscripts submitted to this issue are currently under review.

Independently of this Special Topic, PhiMiSci is now open for submission of stand-alone articles. The first stand-alone-articles will only be published after the inaugural issue on Radical Disruptions of Self-Consciousness (publication of this issue is planned for late 2019). After this point, accepted articles will be published whenever peer-review and revisions have been successfully completed. If you would like to propose a Special Topic for PhiMiSci, please take a look at our guidelines for special topics.

PhiMiSci is an independent publication, but builds on the success and experience of the Open MIND project (2015; Metzinger & Windt, eds.; also published by MIT Press) and the PPP project (2017; Metzinger & Wiese, eds.). Both were peer-reviewed, open-access edited collections published independently of commercial publishers.

Tuesday, June 25, 2019

According to this fact check, "Blavatnik’s company, Access Industries, gave $5.25 million to various conservative super PACs in the 2016 election cycle — including $1.5 million to the McConnell-affiliated Senate Leadership Fund." Blavatnik is tied "to Oleg Deripaska — a Russian businessman who had been sanctioned by the Treasury Department." According to the Mueller Report Deripaska is described as a "Russian oligarch [who…] allegedly received updates on then-candidate Donald Trump’s campaign through Paul Manafort." What did their money buy from McConnel? "Blavatnik co-owns a company that has a 26.5 percent stake in Deripaska’s aluminum company, Rusal, according to reporting from Bloomberg. In April, Rusal announced plans to open a new aluminum plant in McConnell’s home state of Kentucky." Pay to play with Russians, plain and simple, aka treason.

"The first Democratic primary debates are scheduled for later this week, but the candidates are already butting heads. Joe Biden’s comments about his past work with segregationists in the U.S. Senate earned him strong pushback from Cory Booker, and Bernie Sanders appeared to be taking a jab at Elizabeth Warren when he tweeted an article about centrists coming around to her side. So, in this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew debates how much of the current conflicts in the primary are happening within “lanes,” and whether those lanes are evident in the polling. They also assess the stakes in President Trump’s approach to tensions with Iran."

This article highlights exactly what Sanders is talking about doing: Economic democracy. Seems he is the only Dem candidate doing so.

"The new leftwing economics wants to see the redistribution of economic power, so that it is held by everyone – just as political power is held by everyone in a healthy democracy. This redistribution of power could involve employees taking ownership of part of every company; or local politicians reshaping their city’s economy to favour local, ethical businesses over large corporations; or national politicians making co-operatives a capitalist norm. […] Making the economy more democratic will actually help to revitalise democracy: voters are less likely to feel angry, or apathetic, if they are included in economic decisions that fundamentally affect their lives."

AOC is asked if she should apologize for calling child detention centers 'concentration camps.' As usual, she's right that it's those supporting the concentration camps who should apologize. Thanks again future POTUS.

"Renegade Inc. host Ross Ashcroft is joined by the co-author of The Nordic Secret and author of The Market Myth Tomas Björkman to reveal the secret as to why Scandinavia is always cited as the exemplar for a progressive modern society.

'For too long we have glibly relied on the so-called free-market' to solve our intricate social challenges. We can now safely say it hasn’t worked.

"At historical turning points societies have two stark choices: bloody revolution or an informed evolution. Few societies in history have achieved a peaceful transition but there is an exception to that rule…

"In Scandinavia their secret was simple – you can’t do the external leadership and subsequent social change if you haven’t done the internal work on yourself."

Monday, June 24, 2019

"The incumbent House members its identifies are: Cheri Bustos of Illinois, who chairs House Democrats’ campaign arm; Jim Cooper of Tennessee; Jim Costa of California; Henry Cuellar of Texas; Eliot Engel of New York; Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey; Jim Himes of Connecticut; Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland; Derek Kilmer of Washington; Dan Lipinski of Illinois; Gregory Meeks of New York; Brad Schneider of Illinois; Kurt Schrader of Oregon; David Scott of Georgia; and Juan Vargas of California.

"Below each of the Democrats’ names, Roots Action includes several paragraphs about their policy record making the case for replacing them and the districts they serve in, as well as information about existing efforts to challenge any of the lawmakers. The group plans to send the report to its 1.2 million-member email list, including activists in each of the 15 congressional districts."

Just like any big business the tech giants are forming oligopolies that eliminate competition and don't compete with each other but rather conspire to fix prices, sell private information, buy protective legislation and kowtow to government surveillance. If we want truly competitive, innovative, free markets--and democracy too by the way--we have to break up all oligopolies, including Big Tech. But that is definitely not what big business and their legislative cronies want.

Which pretty much covers most of them. Ray Harris commented on this Donna Haraway interview:

"I have long argued that most people misunderstand post modernism and when they attack it, are in fact attacking a straw man. It's a complex subject that requires a thorough grounding in modernism - at a high level (masters/doctorate). So be wary of any one simplifying post modernism and trying to reduce it to something it is not and never was."
In the interview Haraway said:

"Our view was never that truth is just a question of which perspective you see it from. […] The idea that reality is a question of belief is a barely secularized legacy of the religious wars. In fact, reality is a matter of worlding and inhabiting. It is a matter of testing the holdingness of things. Do things hold or not?"E.g., from Caputo's book Deconstruction in a Nutshell:

WASHINGTON—Maintaining that the unmanned aerial vehicle was simply going about its day without posing a threat to anyone, U.S. Department of State officials claimed Thursday that one of their drones was minding its own business on its way to church when Iran attacked it out of nowhere. “This was an outrageous, unprovoked attack by the Islamic Republic of Iran on an innocent drone who merely wanted to attend mass in peace,” said acting Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, emphasizing the drone’s upstanding moral character by pointing out its history of donating to charity, volunteering at soup kitchens, and making homemade cookies for school bake sales. “We’re talking about a drone that sings in the church choir and coaches little league baseball games on the weekends—an absolute pillar of the community. This is an upstanding family drone who did nothing to deserve any sort of attack. What kind of world do we live in where an innocent drone can’t fly through Iranian air space on its way to church?” At press time, Department of Defense officials confirmed that their request for Iran to return the drone’s body back to the U.S. for a proper burial had gone unanswered.

"I believe that what is sometimes called intersectionality is an achievement of the culture of the left in the twenty-first century. The question of social inequalities is intimately bound up with that of discriminations and xenophobia, and it is impossible to conceive any model of an alternative society that does not take the ecological question into account. All these questions must be linked together, but not in a hierarchy, as they are interdependent. […] The twenty-first century left will be anti-capitalist. It will radically question the dominant socio-economic system that is in the process of consuming the planet."

For more see my piece "From capitalism to the collaborative commons" in this journal issue.

I started this video at the point where AOC responds to Todd's uninformed 'opinion.' You can view it by starting it earlier. Anna reiterates AOC's points that Todd and other apologists divert from the real issues about what is happened in our concentration camps.

Saturday, June 22, 2019

She embodies her religious faith in fighting for every human being, while the fake Repug Christians tell the poor to pick themselves up by their bootstraps. Inspiring speech for us with humanity, but it won't penetrate Repugs one bit with their inhumane worldview. Hopefully such speeches will at least inspire more of us with humanity to vote out those cruel, fake Christians.

In this 5-minute video. In Section 1 Mueller specifically investigated conspiracy and coordination with Russia and said there was not enough evidence to prosecute those crimes. From what I've read of and seen about the Report indeed there was plenty of evidence to indict on those crimes. And that the Dem Party won't do their duty about it is itself a crime.

According to the stats here. So much for the Peterson's of the world making a blanket, straw man case against those evil, postmodern liberals.

"Overall public support for free speech is rising over time, not falling. People on the political right are less supportive of free speech than people on the left. College graduates are more supportive than non-graduates. Indeed, a 2016 Knight Foundation survey showed that college students are likely than the overall population to support restrictions on speech on campus. […] The alarm about student protesters, in other words, though not always mistaken about particular cases, is generally grounded in a completely mistaken view of the big-picture state of American society and public opinion, both on and off campus."

You know, that Third Way, the corporate Dems who are bought and paid for by big money. Sanders wears as a badge of honor their labeling him an existential threat to their corruption. He is also a blessing to we the people.

She checks all the boxes and is the only sure candidate who would trounce Dump.* Celebrity is the biggest factor, since we live in a post-truth, post-qualified world where popularity is the only requirement. Maher knows she won't run but is just commenting on how our culture has degenerated to the point of celebrity.

* As an aside, Maher's premise is wrong. Recent polls show at least 5 Dem candidates beating the hell out of Dump in '20. Then again, all the polls were wrong in the '16 election.